[ExI] Bodies

Tom Nowell nebathenemi at yahoo.co.uk
Mon Mar 15 21:38:25 UTC 2010


Being surrounded by gamer friends, I gave the topic some thought over the weekend.

On the one hand, I can easily see people loving virtual worlds - crap, in the mid 90s I knew a guy who spent 55 hours one week on a text-based MUD (I don't think he made it to the end of the academic year at university). I've seen how much time people can spend on D&D online, and I know why people nickname World of Warcraft "Warcrack" due to the addictive properties.

After all, in the real world you never get a reward soon after putting effort in. In fact, you can spend years working hard at a job, or building a loving relationship, to find yourself summarily dumped with little idea why. The online games give people a reward for their effort, reinforcing their desire to play more. Games which obviously give too much favour to certain behaviour/types of players will find a small subset of the player base addicted, and the rest feeling slightly cheated and moving elsewhere. Therefore, the most successful games find a way to reward people in as many ways as possible.

There's also the whole "being who you want to be", where your own physical shortcomings/differences can be clicked away, but I believe others have covered this more eloquently. I remember Max mentioned some time ago his usual Second Life avatar is a younger version of himself, but sometimes he uses a fantastic avatar.

So, if virtual worlds are so seductive, what will stop us all uploading en masse when the chance to dwell 24/7 in a virtual place is possible? Well, I would like to bring to your attention one facet of human behaviour: The F***ing Stupid Hobby (or FSH).

I'll confess here - I'm a LARPER. Yes, I love the live-action roleplaying, and have run around woodlands in fake armour many a weekend. This has all the classic ingredients of a FSH - desire to own odd pieces of equipment you will never use otherwise (much like golfers and fishermen with their kit obsession), an in-group set of impenetrable jargon, friends and relatives not seeing the attraction in the slightest, and people's eyes glazing over if you try to enthusiastically tell them what you did at the weekend.
 (Best example of this - my friend Neve saying to her friends "I'm glad I remembered so much about the stages of grief at the weekend!" - Friend "oh, were you working?" - Neve "No, this was when my fake dad shot himself in the face" - friend "Sometimes it's better not to ask..")

I believe there will always be people who will prefer our physical reality despite the flaws (or maybe BECAUSE of the flaws) and will find some reason to abandon the virtual worlds because of some virtue, real or imaginary, they find in it. After all, compared to spending weeks by a river bank trying to catch a fish and then throw it back, or risk arrest by plane-spotting (something British people seem to do regularly), or spending 150 years (spread over several lifetimes) to play the sitar, choosing our flesh bodies over the virtual world is probably nothing by comparison.

Human orneriness - don't you love it? (Or as e e cummings put it - "humanity i love you"

Tom


      




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